Maryland's lieutenant governor didn't get his Republican
values — "hard work and a sense of purpose and that
quality of individual experience" — from the
Republican Party. They came straight from
Mom.

By Jim Duffy
First, a counterintuitive suggestion: Though we are about
to enter the office of a politician, it might be best to
check political baggage here at the door. Two facts make
this so:

1. Michael Steele is African American.

2. Michael Steele is Republican.

If recent opinion polls and election results are any gauge,
the simple recitation of those facts seems likely to cause
nearly half of the nation to hoot in glee and another
nearly half of the nation to groan in dismay. Approximately
2.7 percent will remain undecided, with all of this
independent of whether anyone has any idea who the heck
Michael S. Steele, A&S '81, might be.

Maryland's lieutenant governor is not the only one of his
kind. Fellow African American Republicans serve in posts as
prominent as Supreme Court justice and U.S. secretary of
state. But the breed remains rare enough that any
politician throwing the one-two punch of blackness and
conservatism is sure to stand out like a pink flamingo in a
flock of drab ducks.

But the sighting of an exotic breed has a way of making
observers gawk, of leaving them so mesmerized by strange
appearances that appearances alone lodge in the mind.
Exotics may be easier to spot, but they are also
harder to see, at least in anything approaching full
measure.

This is especially true in times marked by partisanship so
passionate that many if not most (if not most, all)
politically attuned Americans can know a grand total of two
unadorned facts — one, African American; two,
Republican — and conclude themselves capable not just
of sensing whether to hoot or groan, but of knowing as well
whether they would vote Michael Steele up or down.

It's absurd. Yet it's where we are.

At six feet, four inches tall, Steele is hard to miss.
When
he breezes through the reception area about the time of our
appointed meeting in Annapolis, it's with a sense of crisis
in the air. His eyes glare like a hawk's, and his voice is
squeezed into a tight whisper as he engages in a heated
exchange with an aide. He disappears into his office and .
. . nothing. Five minutes pass. Then 10. Then 20.

Steele's mere presence here in the executive suite of the
Maryland State House is rich in historical reverberations.
At another quite odd time in American politics, 1783, when
the Continental Congress passed several months in
Annapolis, the office space that today belongs to the first
African American to win statewide election in Maryland
belonged then to a Virginia slaveholder named Thomas
Jefferson.

Steele went from being man about Hopkins (that's him in
The Music Man at right) to the seminary, where he studied to be a
monk (below left).

Then, too, there is 1864. That's when Maryland first
established the post of lieutenant governor, only to react
with horror when it turned out that the first man elected
to the job, Christopher C. Cox, was an abolitionist. The
state promptly abolished the post; it wasn't reinstated
until 1970.

Reception-room crisis resolved (or shelved somewhere out of
emotional sight), Steele rises in greeting, his movements
all soft welcome and tinged with regret over having kept a
guest waiting. Pleasantries complete, he fields a first
question the way he will field many of those that follow,
with a brief historical detour to make certain that the
long view is in focus.

"This office has never been a stepping stone to anything,"
he says. "No lieutenant governor has ever gone on to be
governor. Most tend to fade into obscurity."

But unlike many predecessors, who took the title and then
dropped off the public radar screen, Steele has remained on
the best of terms with his boss, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.,
Maryland's first Republican governor in three and a half
decades.

On the television news, Steele seems always at the
governor's side. He gets school-visit photo ops and radio
talk-show microphone moments, and he's been assigned to
lead the way on high-profile issues, including education
and economic development.

"So this is an opportunity to redefine the office," Steele
says. "Being African American and being Republican, it all
means people are going to look at you a little bit more
critically. A lot of people, I've heard they're saying,
'We've got to figure out how to deal with this lieutenant
governor.'

"OK. Fine. Figure me out. Let me know what you come up
with."

Steele has three heroes in life: Martin Luther King Jr.,
Ronald Reagan, and Maebell Turner.

Told in broad outline, his mother's tale brushes at every
turn against trial and tribulation. Born into a
sharecropping family in South Carolina, she quit school to
work the tobacco fields. As a teen, she followed her mother
in the great African American migration north, landing in
Washington, D.C., where she got a job in a laundromat, a
job she'd keep for 45 years. She married an abusive,
philandering alcoholic. Their two children were quite young
when he died of a poisoned liver at age 36.

Steele, who was born in 1958, still marvels at times over
his rather desperate beginnings: "I'm what, four, five
years old when he died? What kind of prospects do I have? A
black child in a segregated city with a mom making minimum
wage?" Laughter rides in a spasm across broad shoulders and
then down arms spread to full wingspan. "Doesn't look real
good!"

He was raised in the northwest D.C. enclave of Petworth at
the tail end of a tumultuous transformation. In 1950, the
neighborhood was basically all white. By 1960, it was
three-quarters black. Still, Steele recalls the place with
nostalgic fondness. Big oak trees, quiet streets, and
close-knit families insulated Petworth from the city's
harsher corners, he says.

After burying her husband, Maebell Turner went back to the
laundromat. Friends counseled her to apply for assistance
— perhaps welfare would pay enough to allow her to
stay home with Michael and his sister, Monica.

Years later, Steele would ask his mother point blank why
she ignored that advice.

"I didn't want the government raising my children," she
said.

Eventually, Maebell met and married Steele's stepfather,
John Turner, a truck driver. The family's life revolved
around faith; Steele's mother is an exceptionally devout
Roman Catholic convert who shepherded her kids to church
every Sunday for Latin Mass. To this day, Steele prefers
that old Tridentine Rite to the modern Catholic Mass.

Steele credits Catholic schools in no small measure for his
success. From St. Gabriel's Elementary, he moved to
Archbishop Carroll High, one of the District's first
desegregated schools. Classmate Kelly Williams met Steele
as a freshman, while both were involved in a production of
Camelot.

"He was a liberal back then, a big Carter guy," Williams
says, "though I guess looking back, it's kind of obvious he
was always a closet conservative."

As college approached, Steele was torn between two paths:
priest and surgeon. He was signed, sealed, and all but
delivered to Georgetown University when he heard from a
classmate that he should go to Johns Hopkins if he wanted
to be a doctor. When he told his mother he'd been accepted
there, the first thing she asked was: "Is it Catholic?"

In the fall of 1977, Rob Freedman lived next door to Steele
in Griffin Hall at Hopkins. Opposites in many ways, they
built a lasting friendship around a shared love for
theater. "I was raised in secular Jewish suburbia,"
Freedman says. "He was raised in a devout Catholic family.
But we never seemed to look at each other across some
racial or cultural divide."

Steele socialized heavily at Homewood. He signed on for
drama productions and the fencing team. He was freshman
class president. Along the way, he lost track of his
studies, a mistake that ushered in the first crisis of his
adult life.

When the letter arrived at his Petworth home one Saturday
morning early in summer, Steele remembers, he snatched it
from the stack of mail and disappeared into his room.
Re-emerging a few minutes later, he located his mother at
the stove, stirring a pot of grits while keeping an eye on
the eggs.

Maebell Turner never even stopped stirring the grits.
"Well, I don't care what you do," she said, "and I don't
care how you do it. But you will be back at Johns Hopkins
come September. Now here's your breakfast. Come and eat,
baby."

Compared with those marching orders, Steele likes to say,
the rough-and-tumble business of Maryland politics holds
little to fear. Still, he has taken some shots these recent
years.

The Baltimore Sun's editorial-page endorsement of
the losing Democratic ticket in the 2002 election addressed
the presence of a Republican candidate for lieutenant
governor on the ballot with an astonishingly dismissive
wave: "Michael S. Steele brings little to the ticket but
the color of his skin." A state legislator dubbed Steele an
"Uncle Tom." Activists brandished Oreo cookies in an
orchestrated stunt at a campaign debate. A Maryland
congressman dropped the word "token" while talking about
Steele.

Steele emits a long sigh at the mention of it all, then
takes aim in particular at The Sun, the newspaper
with which he and the governor are engaged in something of
a blood feud.

"You take it for what it's worth," he says. "It's an
ignorant statement meant to diminish what I represent. It's
a statement of fear: fear of successful African American
men, fear of successful individuals who are different in
their philosophy, their upbringing, their experience."

Later, our conversation winds its way to an anecdote that
might cut closer to the emotional core of this matter for
Steele. Asked to describe an especially moving moment as
lieutenant governor, he singled out a visit by Dorothy
Height, president emerita of the National Council of Negro
Women and a surviving veteran of many of the civil rights
campaigns led by Dr. King.

"My being in this office, the office of Thomas Jefferson,
that means something," Steele says. "It means a lot. And
having Dr. Height in this room, having her come in here and
sit with me and embrace me and thank me for being here
— that, for me, was one of the most profound moments.
It wasn't about being a Republican or a Democrat. It was
about being an African American who has achieved something
significant."

The Monday after his mother's ultimatum, young Michael
Steele arrived at the office of Michael Hooker, then
Hopkins dean of students. His plea for a second chance ran
into a brick wall.

"You're not going to make it at this school," Hooker
said.

Steele returned the next day.

"This is not the place for you," Hooker said. "Go to a
community college."

And the day after that.

"Why don't you just realize you don't have what it takes to
be a graduate of this institution?"

At last, Steele looked him in the eye: "Dean, I can do
this. I can do Hopkins."

"Out in the world there was this mindset that
everything's all right, that the government will take care
of you," Steele says. "Along comes Ronald Reagan, who says,
'This is the wrong way to look at our
problems.'"

By week's end, Hooker offered a glimmer of hope. He told
Steele to enroll in four summer courses — the lineup
to be chosen by Hooker — at George Washington
University. A couple of months later, Steele returned and
dropped his grades on the dean's desk: straight A's.

Steele got to stay at Hopkins, but he had to quit all
extracurricular activities, get a B average, and rethink
his biology major. He ended up studying international
relations instead. And he eventually won back enough
extracurricular freedom to star as Professor Harold Hill in
a campus production of The Music Man and to serve as
junior class president and student body president.

"Hopkins gave me a second chance," Steele says. "But before
it gave it to me, it told me to straighten up, to recognize
your priorities, and to do what you're responsible for, you
know? That sounded a lot like my mom."

After graduation, Steele filled out a round of law school
applications, but his heart wasn't in it. Instead,
responding at long last to an urge he'd felt in his gut
since elementary school, he entered a Pennsylvania
monastery operated by the Augustinian order of priests who
had taught him at Archbishop Carroll High School.

In Steele's mind, Catholics are called to deliver such
blink-your-eyes surprises. His move into the monastery was
an act of faith, but it also was the embodiment of a
countercultural ethos, something the Augustinians describe
as living life as "a sign of contradiction" to prevailing
values.

"I knew what I was giving up," he says. "It wasn't like I
had no clue about life, like I didn't have any idea what
poverty, chastity, and obedience would mean in a world that
was throwing wealth and sex in your face every day."

Steele stayed in the seminary for three years, then
returned to the world. He was still as Catholic as ever,
probably more so, but he left the monk's habit behind.

"I think God was saying, 'You need to take this journey,'"
he says. "I think He was saying, 'There're some other
things I want you to do, but you can't do those things
until you have this experience and you begin to understand
some things about the nature of man and about why you're
here.'"

Steele's move from Jimmy Carter's camp to Ronald Reagan's
did not happen in a single magic instant. It involved an
evolution. In the 1980s, most African Americans regarded
President Reagan with increasing disdain. But Steele had
been drawn to the Great Communicator as far back as 1976,
especially to his penchant for singling out the trait of
determined self-reliance as the core of American identity
and the source of American greatness.

More and more, Steele found himself doubting the received
wisdom of the Great Society. He'd seen his share of young
people deciding to take welfare instead of a job. He'd seen
his share of urban renewal projects turn sour. He began to
look further back, into the stories of African American
communities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
places that often managed against impossible odds —
not just with no government support, but often in the face
of government-imposed obstacles — to build vibrant
businesses and run decent schools.

Was it coincidence that these communities voted Republican?
Were they really doing so only out of lingering, misplaced
loyalty to Abraham Lincoln?

"Out in the world there was this mindset that everything's
all right, that the government will take care of you and
take care of your community," Steele says. "Along comes
Ronald Reagan who says, 'This is the wrong way to look at
our problems. The right way to look at our problems starts
in the home. The right way is all about hard work and a
sense of purpose and that quality of individual
perseverance."

To Steele, Reagan's ideas rang true with the way he was
raised: "What he was saying is that my mom is right," he
says. And they rang true with the lessons he'd taken away
from Dean Hooker. Again, Steele started to feel that
calling to live life as a "sign of contradiction."

Pauline Schneider can't help but laugh at the memory of
the
day in the mid-1980s when Michael Steele came to her
attention. A Washington, D.C., attorney prominent in
Democratic circles, Schneider looked up from her desk at
Hunton & Williams one day and found a fellow partner waving
the résumé of a job hopeful.

"You're not going to believe this one," he said. "He's a
black guy. He's a Republican. He's been in the seminary. He
went to Hopkins."

Soon thereafter, Schneider hired Steele to work as a
paralegal by day while he attended law school at Georgetown
by night.

"The thing that I found amazing about Michael," Schneider
says, "is that he's such an easygoing guy. He's almost a
teddy bear. But he always had this strong sense of
aspiration, of the things he wanted to accomplish."

After leaving the seminary, Steele had married Andrea
Derritt, A&S '81, whom he'd met at Hopkins. He earned his
law degree in 1991, then signed on with the Washington,
D.C., firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Six years
later, he took a job as counsel for a Virginia real estate
operation. In 1998, he started his own firm, the Steele
Group, which offered consulting services on strategic
networking.

In retrospect, however, all this resume fodder barely
touched on the drama central to his story. That drama began
after the Steeles moved to Prince George's County,
Maryland, in 1986. (The couple still lives there today, in
Landover Hills, with their teenage sons, Michael and Drew.)
Once settled in, Steele decided it was time he volunteered
with the local party.

Not wanting to crash the county GOP's Lincoln Day Dinner,
Steele arranged in advance for Hunton & Williams partner
John J. Rhodes, a former Republican minority leader in the
House of Representatives, to send a letter of
recommendation. Armed with such a powerful sponsor, Steele
arrived at the bash expecting a warm welcome.

"The chairman shook my hand and said hello," he recalls.
"Then he kind of left me there. It wasn't so much what he
failed to do, which was take me around a little and
introduce me. It was that no one else there even bothered
to come up and introduce themselves. Now, it's not like I
didn't stand out at this event. For one thing, I was the
tallest person in the room."

The event's keynote speaker proved its saving grace. When
Steele introduced himself to then-Transportation Secretary
Elizabeth Dole, she promptly took him under her wing and
peppered him with small talk.

"When I told friends about the dinner, they were incensed,"
Steele says. "They were like, 'See, I told you these
Republicans, they don't give a damn. They just don't like
blacks.'"

Steele, too, was angry. Yet he found himself resisting his
friends' advice that he cut ties with the party.

"I had two choices," he says. "One, I could wipe the dust
of the Republican Party from my feet and walk away. Or,
two, I could irk the hell out of them by getting involved.
What would happen if I just showed up at their next
meeting, ready to be the tallest guy in the room again? I
found the second choice a lot more interesting."

Told in broad outline, Steele's rise through the
Republican
ranks seems mostly free of trial and tribulation. In 1994,
he won a seat on the Prince George's Central Committee and
then became county Republican chairman. In 1998, he ran in
the party's primary for state comptroller, but lost. In
2000, he became statewide party chair, the only African
American in the country to hold such a post. In 2002,
Ehrlich plucked him out of the pack as his running mate.

Now and again, black Republicans get accused of political
careerism. The theory underlying this notion seems to be
that since they are in short supply in the party and since
they possess potent symbolic value, they are more likely to
zip up the political career ladder — and that a whole
lot of cold calculation and grasping for power or fame is
what's actually behind the exotic beliefs they espouse.

This is a charge Steele's friends have heard, and they
judge the accusation equal parts laughable and infuriating,
not least because Steele made all his major moves as a
Republican activist in, of all places, liberal Maryland. If
he were such a clever opportunist, he would have been much
better off feigning conservatism somewhere much more
hospitable — a Sun Belt state, say, or even
neighboring Virginia.

"When he got into this, he was tilting at windmills," says
Matt Dolan, a friend from high school. "What he was doing
was taking on the dominant party in a one-party state. I've
got to say, this did not look at the time like a very
lucrative career move."

Sylvester Vaughns, a Republican activist in Prince George's
County, found himself sitting alongside Steele at far too
many dreary meetings tackling far too many dreary tasks:
rewriting bylaws, reviewing financials, adjusting action
plans, always with a mind-numbing array of agenda items
still ahead. What Vaughns saw through those long, unpaid
nights in the 1980s and 1990s was a man paying heavy
dues.

"Anybody saying something like that about Michael Steele,
they've got to be crazy," Vaughns says. Prince George's
Republicans "were lost in the woods when he came along, and
he brought us out. There are a few people out there who
might deserve that kind of talk, not that I'm going to name
any names. But not this guy."

So what, in the end, does Republicanism consist of for
Michael Steele? Last August 31, he got a chance to tell the
nation when he strode across the stage at Madison Square
Garden to address the Republican National Convention. No
one who knows Steele was surprised to see him turn the
moment into a tribute to Maebell Turner.

Straight away, he ticked off his mother's name alongside
those of Rev. King and President Reagan. He ran through her
life story. He raved about her determination and her
perseverance. Then he listed the ideas that he cherishes
today because of her influence in his life.

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift,"
he began. "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the
strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the
wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by
encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by
destroying the rich. You cannot build character and courage
by taking away man's initiative and incentive. And you
cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they
should do for themselves."

As lieutenant governor, Steele's constituency crosses all
manner of ethnic and economic boundaries. But he seems to
especially relish opportunities to talk about how rooted
his Republicanism is in the African American-ness of his
life story. He imagines himself a weaver, working
diligently to reconnect frayed threads that once bound
black America into the party of Lincoln.

"I think those historical threads are still very much there
in the black community," he says. "I consider myself a
radical Republican, a true Republican. Talking about
freeing slaves, that was radical. Talking about 40 acres
and a mule, that was radical. Talking about giving women
the right to vote, that was radical. And it's radical right
now to talk about trying to bring the party back to the
African American community."

Then he starts to explicate the ways these radical steps
wrap into what he finds at the core of Republicanism: the
notion that government's role is to clear the way of
obstacles, leaving individuals free to "design and fulfill
their dreams."

What about Michael Steele's dreams for his own future?
That's easy. In a perfect world, he'd win a second term as
lieutenant governor in 2006. Then, 2011, he'd take the oath
of office as Maryland's first African American governor.

"Yeah, of course, I'm hoping people come to think of me as
the kind of guy they'd like to see in the mansion," he
says. "Yeah, I'm hoping they come to feel I represent the
kind of leadership that they find responsive and
responsible and innovative and effective."

But he knows it's going to be a long slog to 2011.

"If they don't, Michael Steele will survive," he says. "I
will wake up the next day, and I will meet whatever
challenge God sets before me. And I expect that whatever
happens, I'll go right on being that 'sign of
contradiction' in whatever it is I'm doing. OK? That's the
bottom line."